Travel is difficult

This week's Photo Friday theme is travel. That took me to thinking of travelling bags, and I thought it would be nice to have one of my plush toys carry a mini backpack.

Only one could carry it properly without its arms being squeezed into an unnatural-looking angle.

That was the first photo I took, and the view that I initially wanted. But there was a shadow because of the camera flash. On the other hand, without the camera flash, it would be too dark to see the bear's feet. (yes, it's actually standing!)

But it was actually very hard to make the bear stand without falling... I had to prop its forehead against the bed headboard, and it still refused to stay standing for more than a few seconds. After a few attempts it fell down in a sitting position, and I thought, this could work too!

"Travel is difficult. I give up!" says the tired little bear.

 Poor little bear... backpacking ain't easy!

Safe koay chiap

Today I tried a new Thai koay chiap stall that had opened at Pisa Corner. To sum it up, I was dissatisfied.

I took the small portion which cost RM5 (big one costs RM7). It's rather small... just look at it poured into a bowl.

Looks slightly better after adding soup.

However I wouldn't complain about the size if it had tasted good enough. But as you can see from the first photo, there were no internal organs at all. It had half an egg, some pork meat (which is carved from pork leg, I think, because I saw pork leg at the stall), some pig skin (which was probably from the pork leg too), some roasted pork (she sliced it on the spot), and some tau kua (beancurd).

This is why I call it a "safe" koay chiap... the only thing that people might not want is the pig skin. But I don't want a safe one... when I eat koay chiap, I want it to be loaded with internal organs that we seldom find in other dishes!

As for the "koay", they look nice, but they were a little too soft for my liking. So basically I am dissatisfied.

Getting close

My kangaroo has been called a squirrel and my squirrel has been called a hamster (by someone who just saw its head in a photo). But no matter, they are sooo cute when they get close, whether it is to each other or to you!

Did you guess? This week's theme is get close.

Seoul Garden Hot Pot

This trip back to Kuantan*, I discovered that Seoul Garden Hot Pot had opened at East Coast Mall. There are three sets for two people at RM30 per set, so we went there for dinner one night.

We ordered two sets for the four of us. The first set was of a rice dish with chicken (like bibimbap) and japchae.

chicken bap (I have forgotten what the actual name is)

japchae (I forgot to take a photo before we started eating)

The second set was a chicken hotpot (we could choose between kimchi soup and miso soup, and we chose kimchi), with two pieces of fried chicken and two bowls of kimgaru rice (which seems to be basically seaweed rice).

kimchi stew

two fried chicken drummets

kimgaru rice

In general everything tasted pretty good. Not exceptional, but it's fair enough for this price. My parents were pretty happy with these new discoveries of Korean food.

* This post is about my trip back to Kuantan during the first week of October.

Pandan by any other name...

There is a show called France 360 on Astro Xi Yue. The host goes to different regions of France, and besides discovering France, she shares Malaysian dishes with the people there. The show is in Cantonese, so I don't really understand it all, but I can listen to the conversations with the local French people because they use English.

Today she visited Brittany (that is Bretagne's name in English), and she made onde-onde, while the French couple that she visited made crêpes.

When she was making onde-onde, she poured the pandan essence onto a spoon and let the French lady smell it. The French lady said, it smells like baiteuil (pronounced something like bai-tui). She said that baiteuil was a tree, and it has a green colour when we cook it (or something like that, I can't remember :P ) Anyway, the host said that pandan isn't from a tree, but from leaves.

But actually they are the same thing! I know because I used to buy pandan glutinous flour in France (to make onde-onde, incidentally), and they called it baiteuil. So I guess they got slightly lost in translation there...

Vietnamese dishes at Hoa Xuan

Hoa Xuan is a small Vietnamese place that is open for breakfast and lunch (up till 6pm, if I remember correctly). We had breakfast there one day.*

The tables were decorated with the restaurant name and some of the menu.

I tried the pho, but didn't find it very good.

With the condiments:

Actually I'm not even sure which condiments were supposed to be used with the pho. When the pho was brought to our table, they went to another table to get the three condiments for us. But were they all for the pho, or for the other dishes?

My mother ordered the tried-and-approved dish of beef dry noodles (I can't remember its Vietnamese name).

This one was good... I took another photo of it when we were almost finished eating, because I felt that it looked totally different after the noodles were mixed.

The third item that we ordered was banh mi. This one was disappointing... the meat inside was meatballs and therefore very unevenly spread out in the sandwich. The sauce wasn't very interesting either.

Personally, among these three dishes, I would only go back for the dry noodles. They have pork dry noodles too, for those who don't eat beef. As for the other dishes that we didn't try, who knows? Maybe there's another good one waiting to be found...

* This post is about my trip back to Kuantan during the first week of October.

Chu char discovery

On Tuesday night after badminton, we were going to get curry mee at the Dhoby Ghaut Cafe (which I have already posted about before), but it was unusually closed (usually it's closed on Mondays). And by the way it has changed its name to Uncle Ho's Recipe Cafe or something like that... but I might have gotten the Uncle's name wrong :P

We then went to the Sri Nibong Cafe opposite it. The place is famous for its koay teow thng in the morning and at lunchtime, and recently (not so recent, more than a year ago, I think) it has started to sell its koay teow thng at night too. But when we got there, one of us suggested ordering the chu char instead.

While contemplating what to order, we looked around at other tables and saw that almost all of them had a plate of yellow thing.

huge "egg yolk", as christened by J

J said it was steamed egg, but upon closer look, XY said that it was ice on top, so it couldn't be steamed egg. So when ordering the dishes, we asked what it was. They told us it was pudding that comes free with our meal. Turns out that they would serve it when we were halfway through eating, and the ice would keep the pudding cold. The photo above was taken when we were about to eat our pudding, so the ice was already half-melted. (By the way, J sweet-talked the person who brought us our pudding into giving us a second one :P Before that, the table next to us had received two... we saw the person bringing the second plate and saying, "Eh, you already have one?", and giving them the second plate too.)

As for the main dishes, this is what we ordered:

Curry fish (RM15), signature tofu (RM10), and veggies (RM7).

The curry was really good, and not too spicy either, so we practically wiped the bowl clean. XY was eating the curry as a pre-dessert...

The tofu was good too, it had some "special" taste in it. I can't make out what it is though, their secret ingredient I guess.

As for the veggies, not bad, but nothing special. Just as expected.

Vivid contrast

This week's theme is vivid. It had me looking high and low for something that looked vividly striking... and for most of the ideas I thought, why didn't I think of this for contrast?

Anyway, I finally decided on this: A vividly-coloured remote control.

Now why didn't I think of this for contrast?

The specialties of Jess Cafe

Another eatery I tried in Kuantan* was Jess Cafe. The specialty there seems to be the curry mee with yong tau foo.

I liked the taste of the curry, and the yong tau foo filling was pretty special. There are only four types of yong tau foo: tofu, tau pok (beancurd skin, they called it), eggplant, and bitter gourd. Each bowl of noodles comes with three pieces of yong tau foo. They don't ask which ones we want, but we specially requested what we didn't want (in my case, bitter gourd!).

Then there is the Japanese pancake that my mother recommended. It is like okonomiyaki, but thinner and therefore crispier too. This is the seafood pancake (the other one was vegetable pancake).

They had already cut the pancake into squarish pieces with crisscross cuts, so we could just pick up the pieces to eat.

We also ordered an ABC to share, which tasted pretty good too.

* This post is about my trip back to Kuantan during the first week of October.

Age is a disease

I have been mulling this in my head for some time now. It all started during the Motorola sports day some time back. I mentioned to a friend that during one of the men's doubles matches, our teammates were already very tired, whereas one of the opponents still had a lot of energy.

My friend's immediate reaction was, "Was that guy young?"

I acknowledged that the guy in question was young, but I felt that something was amiss with that logic. A lot of people blame their age for their lack of stamina, which is understandable because you do lose stamina as you age. But when someone has good stamina, by attributing it to their young age, it does not seem right because they are not getting the recognition they deserve. Just because they are young doesn't mean that they don't have to work for their good stamina! It is not a given; some people are young and yet they lack stamina.

More recently another friend posted something on Facebook about the effects of his exercise making him realize that he was not as young as he used to be. I was pleasantly surprised to see yet another friend comment that people shouldn't use age as an excuse for this.

All that said, I discovered recently that age is a disease... one able to give me an MC.

AGE aka acute gastroenteritis